We’re back to the future in this, the second of two Widow’s Bay episodes released by Apple TV this week. In retrospect, I understand the decision. The previous episode was almost entirely a period piece, set three centuries ago, starring a different cast, and featuring a much less overtly comedic tone. (Still good, though!) In every respect, this episode returns us to much firmer ground. Well, every respect save one: Its climax is set out at sea.
We resume the present-day action a full day after we last saw Tom staring into the void of his bedroom, listening to some infernal entity growl at him. He’s been asleep on his toilet that entire time, during which Wyck and Patricia did a little digging — okay, a lot of digging. They’ve pieced together the torn-up scraps of paper they recovered from Reverend Bryce’s belongings and determined they’re pages in the diary of Sarah Westcott Warren, star of the previous episode. In an effort to get to the bottom of the story, and to find out what’s up with the vial he once wore around his neck that’s apparently key to the town’s curse, Wyck and Patricia exhumed his coffin.
As for his body, it’s still alive and kicking, information that is presented to Tom. Richard Warren is now seated elsewhere in the Historical Society building which used to be his home. The room is dark and beautiful in the lamplight. The process of communicating with this living dead man is left to Tom, who approaches the task not with disbelief — he can see the guy right in front of him, he believes — but with a blend of terror and resignation. His voice is as low and ominous as a grave.
All of this is punctuated by very funny little beats, like Tom getting startled when Warren first speaks, or Patricia barging in because she forgot her purse, or Tom discovering that she’s already started wondering if the undead is somehow mad at her. Ditto the revelation that the vial contains a pact with the hungry demon that is the island, signed in Warren’s “blood, feces, and semen.” Tom puts it down after hearing that.
Anyway, Warren has a theory. The curse on the island is bound up with his bloodline, and Tom, its current “lord protector,” heard the island speak but didn’t heed its call. Warren suspects that if he’s brought out to sea past the point at which island residents tend to die or vanish, the evil power that keeps him alive will lose hold of him, and his body will age and die naturally. Since no one else in his bloodline survived — all his kids died after leaving the island, as far as he knows — the curse will be broken and the island will be freed.
Wyck isn’t so sure about this. He thinks bringing the guy out past the buoys that mark the edge of the island’s reach will likely kill him, alright — he just suspects Warren will change his mind when they reach that point. Wyck has seen the power the island exerts when it wants to call back its own, you see. In a speech that recalls Robert Shaw’s famous U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue in Jaws, Wyck recalls breaking curfew with a bunch of his teenage buddies to test themselves against the allegedly cursed waters. Mark, his best friend, drowned that night, dragged down into the maw of a tentacled creature that sank their boat. Wyck only escaped because he kicked his own friend’s grasping hand away. (It seems this was the end of his relationship with the boy’s sister, town historian Gerrie Doyle.)
Unfortunately, by this point, Warren has already guilted Tom into letting him back out of the coffin they used to smuggle him onto the boat. (There’s a zesty exchange of “fuck you”s first, however.) As they reach the end of the route, Warren turns on the two men and fights to survive. By the time they get him back in the coffin, Wyck’s boat is on autopilot and has almost passed the fatal marker. Tom must slap a life preserver over Wyck and boot him into the drink to save his life, even if it puts him at risk in the water itself.
Warren crumbles away to bones and dust the second Tom goes past the line of no return. Then he returns — Warren stays dead, fortunately — to rescue Wyck, who more or less resuces himself. But he relents and finally compliments his old enemy: “You did good.”
“Thank you,” Tom says, before laughing while adding “I did very fucking good.” You get the sense he doesn’t hear things like that very often, or hear people like Wyck laugh in agreement.
You may have noticed, however, that the vibe in the water and on the island remains basically the same even after Richard Warren dies for good. A painting in the Inn explains the likely reason why: One of his children escaped the rowboat meant to take them to the mainland and swam back ashore. The odds that this child is the ancestor of Lauren Loftis, Tom’s late wife and his son Ethan’s mother, seem very good to me, which is very bad for everyone.
It’s especially bad for Ethan. Kelly (Kylie McNeill), the off-island girl he’s been trying to get with, goads him into going through his father’s stuff to uncover whatever it is he’s been lying about all this time. The secret he uncovers is devastating: Ethan’s mother didn’t die in childbirth, but remained alive long enough to be around when he was a baby. (“I thought it’d be a fun secret,” Kelly complains.) The last we see of Ethan, he’s holding one of the incriminating photos and literally shaking with rage.
“It knows frightened men will do desperate things,” Warren said of the island entity before his death. That kind of describes the Loftis boys to a tee, doesn’t it? And elsewhere, Bichir the sheriff isn’t frightened per se, but he’s definitely desperate — desperate to get away from Patricia and the rest of these crazies. He gives his week’s notice to her to relay to Tom before letting her off the hook for stealing his squad car. (Long story.)
We’ll see if there’s even an island left in a week. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if we really are headed for a down ending, one where the island gets its way, though this show is so surprising so often that I wouldn’t bet on any one outcome. Maybe Mayor Tom makes the same deal with a demon that Warren did. Maybe someone winds up sacrificed — the show made a point of showing us that the subterranean chamber Warren dragged his victims to is still down there, with a door to something further below waiting to be opened. It feels right within Widow’s Bay’s horror-comedy Venn diagram overlap for this season to end with the island’s new lord protector truly making peace with his demons.
In the meantime, it’s still a marvelously made show. The vocal effects for Warren feel like something out of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, and the age makeup holds up extremely well under direct closeups. But even less showy aspects of the episode are striking, like the sharp blue-tinted white light used to illuminate the boat and its cabin, cutting against the digital gloom that often plagues nighttime scenes set at sea on streaming shows. It’s a minor thing, but minor things add up, whether you’re making a show about a haunted island, or actually living on one.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
